Just wanted to mention what a great piece of software Edius 7 is, I have had a rock solid Edius 5 but a not so good experience with version 6 that crashed several times during a project with not much loss, but still very annoying, I"m happy now Edius 7 finally put an end to that as I have been editing the past projects without any hickup so far.

What I find even more amazing about this NLE is how little resources it uses, even for a 64 bit piece of software, to give an example; my current set up is quite basic, the only thing I paid more for was the processor and motherboard so it looks like this:

Motherboard: gigabyte z77x-ud5h
processor: I7 3770
memory: 8gb
videocard, no card, just gpu build in on the motherboard
one spark card for full screen preview of the timeline on a hd tv.
harddiscs: 1 ssd for OS and programs and two 2tb discs and three 1tb discs for editing, no raid setup.

I"m sure premiere users would say; No videocard? only 8gb of memory? No raid? :) but let me share some figures

1 hour of avchd 28mbs 50p native footage edited in a 1080p 25p timeline takes the following time to export:

To a 1080p 20mbs h.264 file: 20 minutes
To a Hqavi (superfine) file: 16 minutes

(That"s with raw files, no colorcorrection, but even with color correction it's hardly any slower) Scrolling on the timeline is smooth and editing 3 camera's in a multicam setup is also smooth, this all with the highest image quality preview on my 2 monitors and bigger hd tv. (I"m editing with 3 screens, 2 with edius, left screen has the timeline and right screen other pallets and preview window and then a 3th big HD tv with a full screen preview from the timeline with my spark card.)

When I load that hqavi file into tmpgenc authoring works and make a blu-ray out of it, it takes 32 minutes, when I make a dvd, it takes 30 minutes.

When I"m editing the memory usage on my machine never goes beyond 3gb.

I really like the fact that Edius can get so much out of a pretty basic machine and that it is yet again rocksolid. It's not perfect but it scores 100% on the 2 earlier mentioned points which are on the top of my must have list when I spend my hard earned cash on a editing machine.

Other people having such good experience without having to break the bank?

I'm jealous ...

I'm using Sony Vegas 12 ... have a i7 3770k, 16GB Ram, nVidia GTX 470 (I do play a strategy game occasionally). A 256gb SSD for programs. A 2TB Internal hard drive for avchd video files etc, and several external hard drives.

I'm using ONE 23" monitor. And edit in FULL 1080P HD. But reduce the quality for smooth playback due to lag.

Vegas ALWAYS crashes atleast once during editing. But i'm so used to saving after every change by hitting CTRL + S that I given up being annoyed about it. It luckily rarely crashes during rendering.

What is the learning curve for Edius like and are all the popular plugins available (magic bullet looks, newblue etc) ? might consider changing if Sony don't sort out Vegas's crashing problems.

And how/when did you discover Edius ? how come you didn't learn Premiere or Vegas etc ?

Edius is my main edit system but I also have CS6 and Vegas 12. I have had Vegas since it was just a DAW and also Premiere for a long time. Edius is by far the fastest and most stable of them all and has the best multicam. I use a Shuttle ProV2 and have it set up so that they all are the same functions so that switching between the NLE's is not different. I use Vegas( and Sound Forge and Spectral Layers) for all my audio and Edius for all video. Don't really use Premiere just use AE and Photoshop from CS6.

Not a big learning curve and good training is around to look at.

Ron Evans

Did a little Google search and reading ...

People are saying Edius is fantastic for cookie cutter event videographers as it's ultra fast due to their codec? But Vegas is better for multi layers, effects etc.

To be honest, I wouldn't dare consider switching if Vegas can some how reduce their crash issues. It's a fantastic NLE that i've come to love.

Well Vegas doesn't crash for me, never has in years. I would look carefully at the drivers you have for any video cards etc and make sure Quicktime is up to date too. Edius has very good effects and layering just as good as Vegas and in some cases better. Vegas has the main advantage in audio which is understandable since it started life as an audio editor only. Both can use VST etc as well as most of the plugin companies effects. I don't use any effects really only colour correction etc and in this regard I think Edius is better than Vegas. Crop/Pan motion in Vegas is called Layouter in Edius and the paradigms are slightly different but result in much the same outcome. For fine control and being able to see what to do cropping a larger image down to project size Vegas is better since the larger image can be seen with the project size as a crop. In Edius the larger background image is a frame and picture only shows in project size. In this regard I prefer Vegas but the scaling is good and controllable to algorithm used in Edius and who knows what is used in Vegas !!! Just good or best etc.

Ron Evans

And how/when did you discover Edius ? how come you didn't learn Premiere or Vegas etc ?

I was a premiere pro cs3 user and had to upgrade when I bought my first avchd camera, cs3 was quite unstable on 2 different computers I had, especially encore would often crash on me during a render. Small projects where not such an issue but the larger it got, the more unreliable premiere and encore got.

I had read some good things about Edius as being a very stable and fast "coockie" cutter, Edius 5 was like night and day compared to Premiere when it came to stability, I could trow what I wanted at it, mix formats, small and large projects and it was very stable. It took me quite some while though to convert from Premiere to Edius. Edius has some very powerfull colorcorrecting tools and you can find some very good tutorials around as well, I use Edius only for fast editing and minor color correcting, also do multicam for each wedding and it's claimed that Edius is one the best multicam editors out there. Going to multicam mode is a matter of pressing one button and I"m off cutting.

Audio is it weaker part and hope they"ll update that in later versions but it does the job.

Edius 6 was not such a good experience for me, I often had crashes on 2 different machines, usually with minimal loss in editing but very annoying but I"m happy to see Edius 7 has not crashed on me yet (knock on wood) Maybe it has to do with it going to 64bit, who knows.

For dvd and blu-ray building I use tmpgenc authoring works now, it's nowhere near as versatile as encore cs3 was (if you plan to custommake your menu's with the help of photoshop and after effects) but it is very fast and stable as well, it also uses my pc hardware very efficiently as I can build blu-ray's twice as fast as realtime without a dedicated videocard.

For Edius you don't need a dedicated videocard to edit though it is recommended when you use effects that require the gpu for realtime preview, I only never use them.

And then you have the spark card, it only works together with Edius and only does one thing; send the timeline out as full screen preview to a full hd tv but the quality it outputs is much better then connecting a tv screen to your videocard plus you can use 3 screens at ones.

I have been using Edius since August and am very pleased.
It has been easy to pick up.
The design of the interface is good.
Most importantly I enjoy using it.
I agree that the audio is weak.
Also it is not particularly good for sorting and playing around with clips and sub clips. But there may be something that I still have to learn in this area.
My previous NLE was Avid. Before that it was Liquid.
Edius works well with the AVCHD files that my C100 produces.

Thanks for the word of advice.

I would rather stay with Vegas as i've learnt it and quite comfortable using it. I just want any crashing problems to be rectified. Most of the time it crashes when I try and apply a plugin or do heavy multi layering (the latter I suppose you can blame on the plugin). Other than that, if i'm doing simplistic cookie cutter stuff I don't recall the program crashing on me. With the heavy stuff you can hear the PC go into hyper threading mode as well which is when i'm a bit wary and ready for a crash!

I might give the trial version of Edius 7 a go just to see what it's like some time in the future.

My workflow is all AVCHD, 3 or 4 cameras long theatre shows, transfer to PC, backup to LTO3 data tape, edit video in Edius , audio in Vegas, encode for DVD in TMPGenc and author in DVDArchitect. Graphics and effects in AE or photoshop. For simple 1 camera family stuff I often use Vegas as it is easy to just overlap clips on a single track on the timeline just like audio editing and apply envelopes with the mouse. If I need colour correction though I will go to Edius.

Mathew Scott has some excellent tutorials on his site of Edius and Resolve.Matthew Scott Cinematography Blog (http://mattscottvisuals.com/color/)

Ron Evans

I would rather stay with Vegas as I've learnt it and quite comfortable using it.


The intention of the topic was not to convince people to move to Edius :) but I think it's better to stay with what you are comfortable with, I know that I could be much more creative with a premiere/photoshop and after effects combo but cs3 was already is very taxing on my first generation quadcore (a q6600 processor) and the system demands have only quadrupled for current set-ups, just reading all the questions from new adobe users that want to set up their system right and all the available info and benchmarktests seems way too complicated for anyone planning to invest in a NLE, at least to me it does. With Edius I only needed to assure I got a motherboard that has a CPU with a build in GPU and all the rest is pretty basic stuff as it just works after you install it. My export speeds prove you don't need a spaceship computer to be able to have a fast enough workflow.

One feature alone was worth the upgrade for me (from version 6) and it's something that's hardly being mentioned which is the field edit option, it basically allows you to export a edit you are working on on your desktop to a low end laptop, take it with you to your client, do some basic editing changes, go home and import the changes back to your desktop. Used that last year when I was filming for a local store. Edius exports lower res avi files which are not suitable for colotcorrection but are perfect for rough cutting, it worked without a issue on a older laptop.

I haven't updated to 7 yet, but the final version of 6 is solid. I do multi-cam concert video, and have never used anything as fast for this purpose. My current workflow:

Canon XH-A1 with OnLocation to the laptop.
After the show, drop that onto it's own video track.
Transfer the content of all smaller camera SD cards to the hard drive (currently 1 Canon HFS200, 4 Canon HFS100 and 2 GoPro Hero2)
Once all the SD material is moved, which takes roughly two hours, drop it all on video tracks.
Once all the audio waveforms appear, manually sync all the waveforms.
Switch to Proxy mode and head to bed.
Wake up and start cutting. Do a rough cut of each song in multicam Proxy mode, then switch multicam and proxy off and review cut and slide rolling edit points to tweak. Move to next song.

In this way, I can deliver an HD cut of a show the next day if I'm in a hurry.

And I do this on an i5 HP laptop with an extra hard drive replacing the optical. The codecs in Edius allow me to playback a mixture of formats in HD in real time, and a matrix of 8 cameras plus preview in Multicam mode.

I have delivered more than 100 concert shoots in this way.